An interesting combination of driftwood and plants grow in the tropical back yard of the Vancouver home of Fritz Friesen. The garden contains banana trees, palms and other plants one usually associates with warmer climates.Handout
/ Vancouver Sun

Fritz Friesen and his wife Lena stand in the front yard of their tropical Vancouver home. The garden contains banana trees, palms and other plants one usually associates with warmer climes.Stuart Davis
/ Vancouver Sun

Fritz Friesen stands in the back yard of his tropical Vancouver home. The garden contains banana trees, palms and other plants one usually associates with warmer climes.Stuart Davis
/ Vancouver Sun

An interesting combination of driftwood and plants grow in the tropical back yard of the Vancouver home of Fritz Friesen. The garden contains banana trees, palms and other plants one usually associates with warmer climes.Stuart Davis
/ Vancouver Sun

Foliage frolickers in the garden of Nicole Delange, in the Berry region of France.Handout photo
/ Vancouver Sun

Foliage frolickers in the garden of Nicole Delange, in the Berry region of France.Handout photo
/ Vancouver Sun

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Quirkiness is a quality that can transform a garden from being a ploddingly predictable parade of plants into an imaginative landscape; sometimes fairy-tale-like in theme, with as many startling, strange and wonderful surprises as Alice found in Wonderland.

To work, quirkiness needs to sneak up on you unexpectedly. It's great when it takes you completely by surprise, and makes you gasp with delight or astonishment.

At its best, quirkiness is totally eccentric, definitively idiosyncratic, slightly surreal and bizarre, but with a whimsical edge (more humorous than freaky or ironic) and always highly imaginative.

If possible, quirkiness, especially in the garden, needs to be both original, laughable (in the sense that it doesn't take itself too seriously) and, in the final analysis, it should be laudable (praiseworthy) and lovable.

I recently visited the immensely quirky garden of Nicole Delange in Morogues, between Bourges and Sancerre, in the forgotten Berry region of France . Throughout the garden, Nicole had placed various pieces of statuary, or pieces of her own ceramic artwork, in and around plants, sometimes literally pushed into shrubs to give the impression that the foliage was actually part of the artwork.

There were hands pointing this way and that way emerging from bushes. Or the neck and head of what was a giraffe-like creature. Or folksy village characters placed as if frolicking in the foliage.

Nicole told me all the faces had smiles. This was deliberate. She didn't want any scowling in her garden. I agreed. Good policy. The garden ticked all the boxes for quirkiness criteria. The pieces were creative, certainly stretched the imagination, and were the right mix of bizarre, surreal, whimsical and thought-provoking. The artwork, for me at least, made me feel like I was in a carefree, seaside garden, something you might find next to a beach on the coast of Cornwall or Norfolk.

I would not have been surprised to find a collection of shells along with anchors, wind-chimes, driftwood art and weather vanes.

Instead I came across a section where various sizes of glass marbles had been casually scattered on the ground like a splattering of gems or (more imaginatively) a collection of planets gathered from a distant galaxy.

In the vegetable garden, there were more imaginative installations, including the statue of a full-sized gardener, leaning on his garden fork and looking in a kindly way over his flourishing vegetable patch.

Nicole's garden was broken up into small, themed room-like areas, often around an island flower bed filled with roses and perennials. An interconnecting series of paths offered a variety of routes to explore the garden.

There were trees, but all I can remember were the two large Robinia 'Frisia' trees that added bright chartreuse foliage.

My eyes were mostly occupied by the novel and creative use of art work and the intriguing way it was placed in and around shrubs.

Next to Nicole's beautiful farm-cottage house, there was a patio walkway made up of colourful ceramic tiles placed in attractive circular mosaics and other interesting patterns.

Next to a lovely periwinkle-blue front door, there were clumps of lavender planted around terracotta pots simply filled with boxwood.

I have seen other quirky installations in European gardens.

At the Keukenhof in Holland, I was amused to find images of large, joyous naked ladies frolicking in the sunshine along with the statute of a panicked lady picnicker on a bench, shooing pigeons away from her lunch.

And I still smile every time I think of how glass artist Dale Chihuly pulled off a delightfully quirky image by floating large multicolored glass bulbs, representing Walla Walla onions, in the main pond at Kew botanic garden in London.

But, in a home garden, I can't recall having seen anything quite as quirky at Nicole's garden of shrub statuary and foliage frolickers.

Here in B.C., I have encountered some interesting examples of garden quirkiness.

In Maple Ridge, Bob Peragallo has piled all his old golf clubs into a container to create a sculptural shrub-like artwork that makes a joke about the old saying that golf is just a good walk spoiled.

"I still consider this the best use of my golf clubs," says Bob.

In another part of Maple Ridge, Greg and Beth Polovick have devoted part of their two-acre woodland garden to what they call their "monster garden" -a collection of gargoyles and fantasy statuary placed under trees and atop stumps and under shrubs.

"Our grandchildren love it," says Greg. "It's the first place they run to when they visit. They race around looking for new monsters."

In her Vancouver garden, Suzanne Perry has built a minimalist, lowmaintenance landscape she calls "West Coast Zen garden."

Built on a shoestring out of a blue gravel Japanese-style raked garden to go with her blue lounger, it's quirky and hip at the same time.

"The wall of our parking deck was painted white and serves as a screening room for movie/slide shows under the night sky," she says.

In Surrey, Gail McRae has pinched an idea from the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall and created her own Green Man Face, using mosses and ornamental grasses. (At Heligan, it is a Giant's Head, with orange montbretia for hair.) In East Van, Fritz Freisen uses all sorts of driftwood as quirky sculptural accents in his exotic, subtropical garden.

There are pieces that resemble an anteater, pair of frolicking eagles, and a figure that could be either a golfer swinging his club or a miner wielding a pickaxe.

But the driftwood piece that has the most impact is a 950-pound chunk that resembles a dinosaur. It has been appropriately nicknamed Fritzosaurus. On Gabriola Island, Douglas Walker has installed a fabulously quirky water sculpture comprised of an assortment of brass musical instruments.

Called Symphony for Flying Pigs, the 25-foot sculpture was built as the centrepiece for a 100-foot pond on a farm. Spraying water in all directions, the fountain is a mishmash of tubas and French horns, all interconnected with a whirl of copper tubing sweeping around the outside like a giant serpent. Please feel free to send photos of any quirky gardens in your neighbourhood to me at swhysall@vancouversun.com

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